This invention concerns an air storage power station, consisting essentially of a gas turbine with a combustion chamber connected upstream and a recuperator connected downstream, a compressor with at least one intercooler and an aftercooler, an electrical machine and an air reservoir.
Such installations are particularly attractive where the night-time output reserves of base load electricity generating plants cannot be utilized. Excess energy generated at night is then stored in pneumatic form in subterranean cavities. During the day this energy is available to cover the day-time peaks.
The first air storage gas turbine installation of the kind described is the Huntorf power station in the Federal Republic of Germany, described in Brown Boveri Mitteilungen, January 1977, Volume 64, pages 34 to 39. In order to reduce the fuel consumption and to adjust the waste gas temperatures to values which are usual in steam power stations, this plant's construction already envisages the application of a recuperator, in which the waste heat from the gas turbine is transferred to the compressed air.
This arrangement has the disadvantage, that the cold compressed air from the air reservoir has, because of low-temperature corrosion, a damaging effect on the flue gas side of the recuperator.